What reasons do you have for studying japanese? Let's say, compared to chinese.

I personally love the people, the culture, and just how unique japan is.

I'm currently trying to decide if my major should be japanese or chinese, as so many claim chinese will be the next world language, there will be so many more jobs, etc, and I'm just curious what got you to study japanese.

Unless you plan on majoring in business/ marketing, the fact that China's becoming a larger world power won't make a financial difference to you either way.

As for regular jobs, there's tons of openings in either Country for a bilingual, so just choose whatever your favourite is!

From everything I've read, Japan to me is the perfect mix of modern and ancient culture. I have a vast number of interests there, so I won't finalize what path I'll take until I'm actually there myself. I'll see what happens.

In terms of careers, Chinese has far more potential - I suppose it could be similar difficulty to find a job in Japan or in China on the basis of language skills alone. Leaving that aside, China's investments abroad mean it has far further reaching influence than Japan. That it's still a developing nation as well as an -enormous- nation means that the Chinese themselves are a larger immigrant community in other nations than the Japanese are. It's even possible (if difficult) to go into intelligence services just on the basis of highly skilled Chinese - nobody is that worried about spying on the Japanese!

Anyway, for a lot of reasons, Chinese is a more useful career skill in English speaking countries than Japanese is.

As for me, I got into Japanese on my interest in anime, manga, and karate. I stick with it because of my interest in the language and the culture. I don't practice karate anymore, and my interest in anime and manga is greatly diminished - except when I hit on something great like Death Note, of course - but there's music, movies, dramas, books... a whole lot of interesting stuff beyond the brightly colored cel paintings.

I started studying Chinese along with Japanese in the beginning, and intend to study Chinese more intently once I have gained at least some fluency in Japanese. I chose to concentrate on Japanese first for two main reason: 1) More plentiful, high quality resources available, and 2) More western influence and orientation in Japan making Japanese an easier step into eastern languages (not necessarily true).

I fell in love with the writing system (that is, what very little I saw of it - hiragana first, then kanji when I encountered it). If I'd encountered Chinese writing first, there's a strong chance I'd have gone in that direction. My relationship with the writing system is more love/hate now (passionately on both sides of that spectrum), and it's far too late for me to consider doing Chinese instead. I'm married to Japanese, for better or worse.

Among the things I came to love about it since I began, would probably be the simple orderliness of Japanese grammar.

What reasons do you have for studying japanese? Let's say, compared to chinese.

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It had been a goal of mine for a long time to learn another language and I was leaning towards Spanish but never had the motivation to actually get started. I did six months of Italian in high school, almost 40 years ago, but as about half the class spoke Italian at home it was a bit of a waste of time and I remember very little.

A business trip to Japan in 2004 was my first real experience of the Japanese language and I was hooked on the Japanese language and culture.

Don't complain to me that people kick you when you're down. It's your own fault for lying there

Less than other languages. It has particles in place of many prepositions and conjunctions, although it uses conjugation in place of some conjunctions, and of course, it has some actual conjunctions too. However, Japanese lacks the entire set of definite and indefinite articles (a, the, and so on.), which depending on the language can be complicated by noun genders and changing the article depending on the grammatical case of the noun the article is associated with... German classes were such a pain, heh.

Of course, -not- having to deal with those grammatical difficulties is in exchange for Japanese being so very context-dependent and leaving the listener figuring things out a lot of the time that would be explicit in most western languages. A whole new kind of linguistic challenge

Of course, some people consider much of what I call verb conjugation to be the linking together of helper verbs, and from -that- point of view then Japanese has incredibly trivial conjugations and a -huge- heap of 'little linking words' in all those helper verbs...

Also, of course, Japanese has all the politeness levels and keigo and so on to make up the complexity that was saved by not dealing with pluralization, articles, and noun genders.

I became interested in Japanese as a language because I liked the sound of it when spoken or even in songs. I know it seems weird but it is true. Then one of my friends introduced me to Manga, Anime and J-music etc. and I thought wouldn't it be great to actually be able to read Manga in Japanese and watch Anime without subtitles or dubbing. So, here I am!

With Chinese on the other hand until this day, I cannot bring myself to like the sound of the language. I cannot explain it. I think it must be personal taste. It has got absolutely nothing to do with the culture or the people. I've only met nice and friendly Chinese people up until now.

The gods envy us. They envy us because we are mortal. Because every moment could be our last. Everything is so much more beautiful because we will someday die. (From "Troja")

knittingthere are some excellent designers in Japan and they release their patterns for free but in Japanese.Since starting to learn I am finding a heap of other things that are inpiring me, everything from the art of Japanese flower arranging to furoshiki (which is how I wrapped all my christmas gifts this year). I love that there is more to learn and that the language is just an access route to even more creativity and inspiring ideas.